


show me your blood

by The_Resurrection_3D



Series: EddTord Finale [2]
Category: Eddsworld - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Green Leader Edd, Angst, Established Relationship, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Monopoly (Board Game), Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2020-06-25 10:59:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19744339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Resurrection_3D/pseuds/The_Resurrection_3D
Summary: "See, we have all worked very hard to put value down on paper, and I am not going to dishonor our efforts by never stealing from another man.I said yes to the world and I have never been told no since."-- Kristina Born,One Hour of Television





	1. today I thought about killing you

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [and everything you say gives me a real bad feeling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16376657) by [The_Resurrection_3D](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Resurrection_3D/pseuds/The_Resurrection_3D). 



**_Are you –_ **

**_“—sure_** about this?” You again ask the Tord That’s Not Tord as he rounds GO again, taking his £200 salary from the bank resting sandwiched between the game board and his gun. A simple Smith and Wesson, not terribly futuristic.

Not that that made it any less terrifying to wake up with its muzzle pressed against your temple, a weather-worn changeling’s finger on the trigger.

There’s no other word to describe him but changeling, though he has provided a few – “Red Leader,” “Tord, from the future,” but it’s not Tord, not with that faded army uniform and eyepatch and crimson arm and those ugly, ugly keloid scars.

But that silver eye that bores into yours – that you know too well.

(that, and the fact that you recognize the design of his fake arm from the doodle your Tord had shown you a new model water- and dirt-proof, drawing energy from your own body instead of the wall)

(no wonder now why you'd had to practically break his arm to see it) 

He’d told you not to fight, not to cry out – your Tord is probably comatose in his lab anyway, and he’ll never get here in time. Made you get out, throw on some pants in a cruel allowance of dignity, and asked you what game you’d be willing to gamble your life over.

And since you suck at chess, poker, Jenga, and Dominion, you’d placed your bets on your only other option: Pokémon Monopoly.

He’d laughed at that, a harsh, wheezing sound too much like your Tord’s, and made you set up the table, gun still lazily trained at the back of your skull.

Now his laugh has become a small smile and cold, distant eyes, taking in with disinterest all the monopolies he’s only one away from completing. Any wrong landing could cost you a quarter your remaining funds, and you’ve been subsisting mostly by repeating landing yourself in jail. Your body feels light and carbonated, anxiety bubbling under your skin, legs bouncing so hard the table shakes, but he’s allowed you that thus far.

“About killing you?” he asks as he slides his tiny silver Jigglypuff across the board. “For the eighth time, no I have not. Although I am willing to hold off a bit after the game if you’ll try to pay for takeout with Monopoly money.”

“You’re gonna make me pay for my last meal, too?” You ask indignantly as you roll the dice. Nope, no doubles, still in jail with him visiting. He takes them up and enlarges his smile.

“I was thinking we would split the check; it’s only fair, after all.”

A nervous chuckle bubbles up from your chest, bursting on your murmured insult. His eyebrow quirks as you double over, laughing so loud the whole house should’ve already woken up – but they’re not, they’re out at dive bars or probably filming more porn in seedy hotels, or blacked out in their chair, drooling all over hentai mags and scribbled equations. Your head thumps on the table as you clutch your stomach, ribs screaming in agony.

“What did you call me?” he asks, moving his piece. “Hurry up, I landed on your Tangela.”

You try to speak, but every scrap of air has claws, and honestly it’s not that funny, anyway.

Well, in aggregate it is, even though it isn’t. “Commie fuck,” you finally choke out, lifting your head from the kitchen table. “Gonna murder me and you won’t even pay for my fucking Chinese food.”

The Not Tord shrugs. “I don’t usually carry a lot of money on me.”

“Oh, _I am aware.”_

He clicks his tongue in annoyance. “C’mon, darling, tell me how much I—”

“Don’t fucking ‘darling’ me,” you snap, and realize with a slice of pain that Tord hasn’t called you darling, _kjære_ , or even _snuppa_ in weeks. “I’ll take as long as I fucking want to.”

“Oh, really?” He’s flippant, leaning forward on folded arms, looking into your throwing knife eyes with his own half-lidded. Like you’ve made one of your usual flirtatious challenges again, the kind that always – do, _used to?_ – end in either physical sex or a very prolonged _Street Fighter_ tournament, for which the physical sex is but a metaphor. 

Which pisses you off all the more, of course, and you’re tempted to make a grab for the gun again, but the violet bruises all over your right hand warn otherwise.

Not that you should care, if you’re going to die anyway. Why not push a little farther and get it over with?

_Why not not be a dumb ass for once in your life and try to win him over?_

Before you can reply, however, he picks up the dice and rolls for you – snake eyes, freeing your Bulbasaur to move onto his Zapdos. Which, since he owns the other one, means you owe ten times the next dice roll.

Joy.

“Do you want to do it, or should I?”

Breathe, breathe. In, and out. There are some buttons you need to push before he pushes that gun into your mouth.

“What are Tom and Matt like in the future?”

“ _Holy shit,_ this again?” He makes another grab at the dice, but for once you’re faster. Holding them hostage against your heart. “I’ve told you, Edd, they’re _fine.”_

“Sorry I _care_ about my friends, unlike you.”

“Of course I still care about them!” the Not Tord fires back. “I care about all my secretaries.”

You can’t even _fathom_ Tom working under Tord and not having been lobotomized, especially when any game involving him ends with either you or Tord getting beaten with the board nine times out of ten, but it does ease you that tiny bit, to know they’re at least safe.

“You’re not yourself, back in my time,” he continues, sounding rung out and lightly cracked. “No, you’re not doing too well at all. I’ve started letting you escape to try and keep the game going, but you don’t have much bite left in you anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you haven’t broken into my chambers and berated me for patronizing you like that – and since I embedded a tracking device in you while you slept – no, no not yet, many years from now -- I also know that you’re not dead, you just haven’t tried. You can understand why I think that’s a huge red flag.”

You nod slowly.

“So honestly, you should be thanking me, for coming back here and having mercy on you before you can let yourself sink so low.”

Your heart sinks, face a harsh rictus. Of course any sympathy from him is self-serving; you don’t know you’re expecting anything your Tord would do for you.

“I’m starting to doubt you’re really Tord from the future,” you say and throw the dice – 12. Damn. “The Tord I know would never let me die flaccid, first of all.”

He laughs loudly. “Aren’t you hard, Edd? I am!” As he snatches your money out of your hand.

And now you’ve got him where you want him. “It’s kinda hard to keep it up when I’m getting fucked like the proletariat.”

A big, nostalgic smile.

* * *

One wrong space and you’re finished.

You feel sweat running down your forehead, but the Not Tord has the audacity to say, “This is the most stress I’ve felt in a long while,” as he lands on one of his own Pokécenter-laden spaces. “Sure you don’t want this get out of jail free?” He asks, flipping the scarlet card over in his fingers. “Consider it a gift, from me to you.”

You shake your head. “What would Marx say if he saw you playing this?”

The Not Tord shrugs. “’Cool game, how do I play?’ He probably wouldn’t say that, realistically, but I like to imagine he would.”

“I also don’t think Marx would be into bondage, but—”

The Not Tord reels with silent laughter. He nearly tips his chair back too far, but swings forward and pounds his fist on the still-shaking table, frame shaking with barely-suppressed laughter. “Oh, I haven’t thought about that in so many years.” The night Tom had made some comments about potentially finding Tord’s published Marx/Engels/Reader erotic fanfiction online, and Tord had taken that as a challenge. How he managed to write fifteen thousand in one night without dying of caffeine overdose, you still don’t know.

But it’s working. You don’t remember what exactly what you’re aiming for is called – well, it’s called _not dying,_ but its scientific name – but you’re hoping it’s working.

“Laughter is the antidote” – that was the director of _Re-Animator_ , one of the first movies you and your Tord watched over and over again in high school, from a magazine interview he’d let you flip through as you two bumped around his room, pretending to do homework.

“Well,” his voice draws you out of your memories, “I think Marx could also appreciate the concept of the magic circle. If religion is the sigh of an oppressed creature, then stepping into the circle is like taking off your coat.”

You stare at him blankly, quietly. You honestly don’t even remember whose turn it is anymore, but you let him anyway, both of you visibly delighted as he’s forced to pony up a hundred.

“The circle,” he explains, “by which I mean the magic circle, is essentially the idea that play exists in its own separate world, whether physical or constructed.” That nostalgic smile on his lips stretches, growing crooked. “I didn’t truly understand that until I realize how I felt around you. Like…” He sighs as your hand stills, the dice falling dully out of your hand. “Like I’d stepped outside all my responsibilities for a while. Like everything inside me could finally be quiet.”

You think back to your childhood games, of the hundreds of times they would lapse into rib-stabbing, on-the-floor-defenseless laughter for no real reason at all. 

You’re both silent, and you realize he hasn’t looked up from the table in a long time. You slide your Bulbasaur across the board and throw some money at him; you don’t count how much, and neither does he.

He harshly scatters the dice across the table. “Until I left.” You open your mouth to ask, but he continues, “The battles were magic circles for a little bit, but then battles became war, and then war became yet another part of the routine.” He reaches across for your hand, but you draw it away without thinking. A flash of pain across his face. “It’s been so dull without you, darling.”

“Then why did you leave?” _And why do you talk about my future self like I’m dead?_

“It felt like I had to. And maybe I didn’t, but we’ll never know how it could have turned out, now will we?” You ask why he can’t just talk the Tord here into staying, but he shakes his head. “I am very certain it wouldn’t change anything that matters. In three months from now, I am going to leave all of you. I am going to tell you a month before it happens, and you’re going to make me promise to write.” He slides his piece onto one of your spaces, but you don’t dare interrupt. “And I’m not.”

You wish you could believe your Tord wouldn’t do that.

The lump in your throat swells around the word, because some part of you realized how much it explained when this older, broken Tord woke you up with the cock of his gun, and now that part is growing too brazen to ignore. “Why?” you asks, and you hope it’s less desperate to his ears than in your own.

“Because,” he continues, worrying his stack of yellow bills in his hand. “—Well, first, it was partly because I was busy immediately. But I think even back then that if I wrote to you and heard all about how much you missed me – or worse, how much fun you were having without me—I’d rush back. So I put my blinders on and refused to stop looking forward. Life is too short for regrets.”

“And yet you time-traveled here to play Pokémon Monopoly before you kill me.”

The smile is back, stitched on haphazardly. “A very astute observation. Though the Monopoly was your idea. Now, are you going to roll?”

You do and get sent straight back to jail. “No,” you say sternly before he can even reach for it.

“I’ll give it you for free.”

You shake your head. “What happens to me in the future?” you ask as you hand him the dice.

A dark cloud rolls over his face. “You lose your _laughter._ Just hollowed out your personality with a melon baller. And I know it’s my fault, but it’s still not the outcome I truly expected. Believe you me, Edd. You’re…” He shakes his head, and you want to ask him to look you in the eyes, but you don’t. Tord's never liked eye contact, anyway. “Like I’ve said, I don’t recognize you anymore. You didn't replace it with anything fun; you're just boring. It kinda --" He sniffs, smiles, scratches his face. "It kinda ...not hurt, but also did simply watching you sleep” _(wait, how long were you watching me sleep?)_ “because you were smiling. Don't give me that look; there was no Shinji Ikari shit going down."

He laughs at your agonized expression. "You haven’t done that in a long time, too.”

Eight spaces, onto another of his own properties. You roll; thank god, no cigar.

His voice takes on more knowing fun as he says, “And the Edd I knew would have killed himself before he could become such a humorless fuck.”

“No,” you reply, “I’d go back in time and build an army of my ancestors to then go forward into the past and kill my past self. If I can’t be funny anymore, I can at least be overdramatic.”

He laughs, a warm sound ruined by how the obvious years of smoking can’t take the familiarity away, and finally levels his gaze at you.

It’s your Tord. There’s no doubt about it.

You’re shaking before you even realize it and he’s simply watching you, curious and sad and maybe even a little amused.

Who can say? Clearly you don’t know him at all.

In retrospect, the fact he's been slipping from you over these past few weeks, not replying to texts, slipping from your bed too early for the company of equations and scrap metal, falling asleep during your movie nights and covering his workbooks with his whole chest whenever you try to steal a glance were probably red flags.

You want to ask, but you don’t. You’re not going to show him any more weakness, so ~~you’ll privately be the biggest coward to ever walk the face of the earth~~ instead you’re laughing again, hollering to the sky because you’re going to die shot by your time traveling ex-boyfriend over a game of monopoly and isn’t that just the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard?

“God what time is it?” He twists in his chair to check the clock above the doorway. 12:47, without either of you realizing it. Had he really only woken you up two hours ago?

The Not Tord stands, cracks his neck and pockets his gun as your heart stops beating.

Wait. Pockets his gun?

He sighs heavily and stares at you for a long moment, expression unreadable. He comes around to your side of the table, wincing as you sink into yourself. “Don’t run, or I’ll shoot,” he says, which makes the hydraulic presses in your brain shriek.

“I thought you were gonna shoot me anyway.” _Bold last words, Edd._

He shakes his head and takes your hand in his as the other goes into his coat pocket, a flash of red in the outskirts of your vision as he raises your hand to his lips.

And kisses it. Softly.

“I love you,” he breathes against your skin, the first time in so long that Tord’s said it first; “ **_Happy anniversary—_ **


	2. you'd only care enough to kill somebody you loved

**_“—Red!”_** You call out over the familiar flash-bang of your secretary’s biannual memory wipe. In the back of your mind, you wonder how many more she can take before she’s reduced to playing in puddles of her own drool, but HR can deal with that later.

Right now he’s shoving your secretary out the door and slamming it shut. You’re climbing out of your wheelchair and into the cola rocket car you’ve installed along the handrails while he crosses the threshold. Silently Red Leader steps over Matt’s sleeping form amongst the carnage of empty cans and storyboards and half-finished props and tipped over cork-boards covered in doodles/pictures/script pages, his heavy boots further scuffing the spilled paint and cigarette burns that make Pollock paintings of once chessboard-patterned tile.

Three creative minds exploded upon a ballroom canvas.

(And there’s always room for one more.)

The rocket careens down with a series of harsh, grating clunks, almost throwing you out as it races to the bottom of the staircase, like it always does. Red stands at the first step, fixes you with a bored eye as you grind to a halt beside him, steering wheel digging into your stomach like a twisting punch.

The only bit of Red Army regalia he’s kept tonight is the fur-lined coat hanging open atop his shoulders as his gloved hand sits in his pocket. Plain red shirt, one sleeve tied at his stump with a rubber band. Worn, mud-stained jeans. Gun belt, of course, but you’re none too worried.

If he planned to kill you, he’d have done so when you blacklisted him, or when you knocked him unconscious and made the doctors pop his useless eye out on live TV.

You blow up his robot, he cracks your spine. You take his eye, he takes your leg.

No, you aren’t go out by bullet; he’s told you as much before. Years and years ago, said with the same humor and certainty as when you two promised to run off to NYC and live together as Sesame Street queens should you both outlive your wives.

No, you’re going out on the courts of murderball. _C’est la vie._

At least he’s never lost his _eye_ for aesthetics. 

He doesn’t ask why you’re smothering your laughter.

“You’re rather early,” you say, cranking the shift until your car is rolling backwards, lifting up the stairs to follow him. You have to almost yell over the machine’s crunching protests; you don’t know how much worse his hearing’s gotten since he rejected your offer of cochlear implants the last time he visited. “Did you miss me that much?”

“Not particularly.” A shrug. “But you know how tedious army life can be.”

You crank the shift again, stopping with a gesture towards the seat beside you. “Now come on, hop in.”

He pauses on the step above you, scanning you up and down before raising a brow. “Looks like it’s time for another resizing.”

You roll your eyes. “Hardy har har, Red.” You wait for him to quip back, but instead he starts climbing again, ignoring your calls until you start the car again, crawling along at his pace. “You’re really walking?”

“I have two legs, don’t I?”

“A ha ha ha ha.” You make a grab for his jacket, but he steps out of your reach. “Red you are simply too funny.”

He doesn’t even smile.

* * *

“Come here,” you wave him after you, scooping up Xingo before she can get caught under your wheels. “I had Bing whip up something new in the lab!”

Wheels and footsteps crunch the canvas and tarps beneath you like autumn leaves as you roll towards your desk – and the new machine behind it.

“Let me guess?” He asks, “Arsenic baby formula?”

Oh, he’s gonna love this. You lead him past the tree trunk columns of fountain soda, underneath the click-click-click of Coca Cola bottles crawling high above you towards the gift shop now used as your and Matt’s and Tom’s (but mostly Matt’s) walk-in closet.

You press a button on your wheelchair’s armrest remote, flipping green lights onto a row of 50s-style vending machines – and behind that, your new clothing line, and the rack of paintball guns that made it possible. His rictus only harshens as he scans the new prints of Matt modeling said clothes, hanging askew over the old Evangelion posters he’d requested when you first moved everyone into the World of Coke, when you paid the best engineers to repair the alien ship and drag it across the ocean from Atlanta right to old Durdum Lane.

When his eyes finally land on the new machine – on the words “POISON SODA GOODIES” emblazoned within a frame of blinking lights, the word “soda” hastily scrawled over where “apples” used to be – he plants his face in his hand.

“I was watching some _Rocky and Bullwinkle_ the other day, and I decided to make a little tribute.” You fish around in your pocket and flash him a shiny coin before dropping it in and yanking out the pinball shooter beneath “cyanide.” The pad of his thumb is digging into his eyelid as the machine clanks and spits a nice, cold can of Beverley into your hand. 

You yoink out your quarter by the string.

Tossing his jacket onto your desk in a gust of paper, Red Leader plops down on the mahogany edge as you toss the can in his direction. Without meeting your eyes, he cracks it open, foam cresting over his hands. He knocks back a few quick gulps.

His brow furrows at the image plastered directly over your desk, framed by bike chains and bottles. Matt had insisted the presses’ first photographs of your new body should be more than simple candid shots, so he’d driven you from physical therapy to your private beach and covered your lower body in fake prop limbs and blue cloth tentacles and oversized novelty car keys, stuck your head in a fishbowl, and photographed you as you played on your phone. A beached merman with a junkyard for a tail.

After a pause, Red asks, “That didn’t really have cyanide in it, right?” as he crushes the half-full can and tosses it over his shoulder, the spray coating your desk and –

“Hey hey hey!” Xingo is nearly thrown from your lap as you race forward, hastily wiping your laptop’s keyboard off with your sweatshirt’s sleeve. “You’re lucky it didn’t, asshole.” That was supposed to be the joke: it tastes so bad you wished it really had been poisoned. But apparently he’s in an extra pissy mood tonight – “Look, Xingo ripped my pants because of you.”

You run a soothing hand down her old back, dabbing your sleeve at the blood beginning to bead up from the new cuts in your thigh. Thankfully they’re none too painful – your leg may have been lopped off at the knee, but the nerve damage runs all the way up to the broken discs in your lumbar spine, making even your good leg a trial by fire whenever the universe decides to fuck with you.

That’s one of the worst parts – how you’ll have to lie in bed and get your assistant to plug in a morphine drip simply to make the carbonation beneath your skin go flat. And that’s when you’re lucky. 

That’s also one of the things you’ve never told him. You’ve talked about the phantom pain, sure – you both still have it, even after all these years and kidnapped doctors and expensive treatments – but you don’t let him know how many times you’ve hobbled from your bed into your renovated shower, clawing at your skin for invisible bugs, a metaphor until you haven’t slept more than two hours in twice as many days and you’re scratching raw a leg that’s no longer there, the water leaving your skin sunburn pink.

“Then clone her without claws next time,” Red says with a little shrug.

If you have to re-explain to one more person how that defeats the purpose you’re going to scream.

 _Stay calm, Edd._ You need to rein the conversation back in, so before he can say anything else: “I’m even thinking of installing a few of these babies in the mines. Matt suggested it was high time to shake things up a little, so we’re gonna stop livestreaming the executions and try something a little more subtle.”

That magical mix of amusement and disgust blooms across his face, recalling both of your days as children gleefully dissecting frogs and daring each to touch roadkill with your bare hands. “You, subtle?” 

“I know, right? And from _Matt,_ of all people.” You double-check that your art file saved without incident before wheeling back to the machine, slip in two more slugs and yank the stopper for a pair of regular, un-poisoned colas.

This can he catches and sets atop his jacket, reminding you of his first middle school dance since moving from the continent, where you convinced him to turn his trench coat into a sack and helped him smuggle out a 12-packs’ worth from the public coolers.

Reminding you of how you slept with that coat as your only blanket the night he left, how your first date as Red and Green Leader began with him noticing you wearing it and telling you to take that goofy shit off.

Now he stretches his shoulders back with a soft groan, reclining until he’s lying atop all the very important blueprints and memos and treaties you’d been doodling mech designs on. “You’re such a shit liar.”

“I’m not lying!”

“Matthew Graves, subtle? That’s some flat-earth tier bullshit.” A heavy sigh, then a hiss of air. “But _then again—”_

“Oh yeah,” you interrupt with a laugh, for you know he must be referring to the disc-shaped “alternative globes” one of your daughter companies unveiled recently. Wasn’t even noon that day before your private cell chimed with a _I hate you._

“Every time I think I finally have nothing inside me left to die,” he continues, “You push out Cola brand nipple clamps, or – don’t write that down!”

You push away from the desk before he can grab you, your cat ripping open new lines your skin, but you laugh and he furrows his brow.

“Why not?” You ask him. “The irony dollar’s growing. Now c’mon, the paintball guns’re already—”

“Why don’t we just watch a movie?”

Xingo growls lowly, and as you smooth your hand down her back you feel familiar bumps; tumors, aka the clone common cold, you’ll need to send in your second order in as many months.

But you can do that tomorrow. Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight.

 _“Alright,”_ you say, drawing out the word as you avert his steely gaze, pretending for a moment that you don’t know where on your remote the right button is. “ _Insane Zombie Pirates from Hell_ 2019?”

That finally makes him crack a lopsided smile. “How fucking dare you remind me.”

* * *

The button reveals the twisty cartoon tunnels that take you from the old taste testing room to the old theater, where every guest had to sit through some crywank ad film before they could explore the rest of the facility.

You take your favorite prosthesis with you but leave Xingo; clones lose their tolerance for loud noises almost immediately out of the tube.

You two order overpriced rum and coke and bicker briefly over the movie – anything but the remake, please god – what do you _mean_ you don’t want to experience the death of art right before your eyes? – so eventually you settle on _Rocky Horror Picture Show,_ a celebration of its fifth year since becoming mandatory watching for every citizen above the age of fourteen. He sits abreast to you, feet up on the seat in front of him. You swallow down the disappointment that you can’t take his hand.

Before you even have a chance to get into the film, however, the screen pulses green. You groan and press a button on your remote, turning the projector onto the security cameras that dot the outside. Four dark figures are taking spray paint and hammers to the E of the large EW sign before the front gates, and with another groan and button-press you and Red watch as limbs suddenly start flying. Lasers cut off heads, cleave bodies in two, the blood filling in the sidewalk cracks with black.

“I should start charging you for that,” Red notes.

“Can’t, I still own the rights to all your inventions.” At the time it had felt like a dick move, but you weren’t yet in a position to argue with the board of investors. Now the irony of your loyalists using security systems designed by the Red Leader himself is too delicious to resign.

“Christmas present?” he asks sweetly.

“You don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“Hanukkah?”

You roll your eyes. “Tell Tom to come back from vacation, first.”

Tom has always been the emissary betwixt you two during the holidays, bringing back and forth donuts and leftovers and candy canes when you all were children, old comics and poisoned food and quirky little gifts now that you’re all grown up.

Like Red’s last gift to you: a noose. Pre-tied and everything, fairly thick and sturdy, because he’s just so thoughtful.

On the screen, the bodies are already being raided and the raiders are already turning on each other, bludgeoning whoever’s closest with blood-soaked bats and spraying paint into each other’s eyes. In the bottom of the screen, plump mutant rats are tearing out ligaments from one of the corpses’ hands and are using it to play jump-rope.

You turn the screen back to _Rocky Horror._ “Interested in another weapons contract?” You loll back, hands a pillow.

“I’ll consider,” he says simply with a sip on his drink.

You wait for him to say more, to sing along with you as the first number starts, but he doesn’t, so the words die on your tongue, too.

Not too long later, you dare a glance over. He’s on his phone. “How are your bread lines looking?” you ask, perhaps a bit too loudly. 

“Splendidly short,” he quips back. “My man’s” _(means nothing, just one of his show’s inside jokes, it means nothing)_ “latest invention has doubled our production recently, so –”

“You mean theft.”

“You mean innovation.” Another sip, eye still trained on his screen, and you’re tempted to grab your leg out of the next seat and bash it over his head. “All this money and yet your factories haven’t been renovated since my parents stopped having sex.”

The corner of his eye crinkles with a small smile as you laugh, quip back, “But then I’d have less money.” He shakes his head, takes another sip. Before, he would have launched into a tirade, quoting extensively from the _Manifesto_ and probably Engels and Marx’ private love letters, willfully ignorant of how quickly the words jumbled in your mind.

You were never the one for complex ideas; you wonder if he ever resented you for that. Because as much as he loved taking the helm of each project, storyboarding OVA trilogies with you and fighting tooth and nail with Tom over every story beat and character name, sometimes…

_What’s accelerationism, again?_

_How sweetly and patronizingly he’d patted your head. Capitalism but every time you feel oppressed it gets faster._

“Which reminds me,” his voice breaks you out of your reminiscing. “How are sales? My sources say half the city’ll be eating their shoes by the end of the third fiscal quarter.”

“I should expand into cookbooks, then! Shoe leather should have some cross-market appeal; it’s gluten-free, right?”

He presses one of the buttons on the inside of his chair, reclining it until he’s lying flat, avoiding your gaze for the ceiling. You chuckle. “What? You were always the better cook than me.”

“Because you thought cola syrup counted as a sauce,” he says.

“I still don’t see how it isn’t.”

His fingers drag down his unscarred cheek, a heavy sigh, so you ask him if he’s going to see the new comedy Matt’s starring in. He says no, you say he better, because it cost a lot to convince them to take Matt on. Something about a “Neo-Aristotelian comedy” – how that’s any different, you don’t know and don’t really care.

“It means mean-spirited. Because Aristotle thought humor came from realizing we’re better than other people.”

Your immediate thought is well _that’s fucking stupid_ , but instead you say: “He must have been fun at parties.”

You can see a million different thoughts flash across his face, but he merely puffs out his cheeks and presses another button on the inside of the seat – large Mickey-gloved hands pop out of the back, and he slams the button in until they recede.

“Don’t want a massage?” You ask, planting your cheek in your palm. “You should; your knots probably have knots.”

“You know,” he says, slowly relaxing until he’s lying down on his side, facing you. “I once heard one of them say that true comedy is just God’s lets-play of our lives.”

“Tom pissed himself lol can we hit ten likes.”

His lips thinned into a harsh line – the telltale sign he’s trying hard to suppress a smile. “Again?”

“Yeah, didn’t you see the reports?” That had been the reason Tom insisted he needed a two-week vacation in the middle of filming, one which he has only granted after finding you a suitable replacement director. “Also, what twelve-year-old’s deviantArt did you get that off of?”

“Look it up yourself,” he snaps back in toothless anger. “You still own it, don’t you?”

When you’d first told him, he’d been reading to you the inspiration for carving your favorite advert (the first cola ad you’d ever posed for, of course) on the moon. About a fat cat corporate king trying to buy his wife all the flowers and songbirds in Ireland -- Red, back when he still let you call him Tord, had rolled his eyes and said that if you were going for something similar, you should have bought hentaihaven.

So you did, and promptly shut it down.

He didn’t talk to you for almost a year. You were so concerned with each peaceful day that went by you had to triple and quadruple check with your spies that he was still alive.

You’re about to settle back in for the rest of the movie when the screen flashes again, Discord ringtone bouncing off the walls. 

Your groan, this time, is more of a yell. You decline, but the front desk only rings again – and again and again, until finally you relent, much to Red Leader’s tittering amusement.

“What?”

“Mr. Whiting.” Your secretary’s nervous voice, the shuffling of papers, whispers too static-choked to comprehend. “One of the sentries found something you really should see.”

“How urgent can it _possibly_ fucking be?”

“It’s about Mr. Rossaler.”

Another drawn-out, heavy sigh. “Another DUI is about as urgent as a day that ends with y—”

“Oh no,” Red interrupts, grin full of teeth. “You’re gonna wanna hear this.”

A quizzical look, a cold feeling in your gut. “Okay,” you say slowly. “Fax it over.”

“Yes, Mr. Whiting.” The call ends, and the seats begin to blink their lights. You aim your remote towards the one in front of you, and out of its back spits a dark sheet of paper. You rip it out the printer’s mouth, turn the lights up –

Tom: hair swept back, wearing nothing but Red Leader’s jacket and Susan’s shoulder strap, the bass all that’s covering his crotch.

_INTRODUCING 80’S BOY_

There’s more, butterflies and bodies and red banners, but the details fade away as your eyes drill into Tom’s face – a huge, devilish grin, not a single sign of resistance or hesitation.

“I wanted to do a live-action remake of _Urotsukidōji,”_ Red Leader’s words are far away yet right in your ear, his breath hot against your skin. “But Tom wanted this weird arthouse bullshit where he basically fucked Christmas to death, so we had to compromise.”

“What’s this?” You ask, far too softly.

“Our new production, _A Butterfly to Rest._ See?” He points to the title you hadn’t even noticed. “Right there. A lot sexier than the play’s actual title, believe me.”

“Play?”

Your hands are shaking.

“Yeah, Tom and I decided to do something autobiographical the only way we knew how – as either a comic, a porn parody, or as a pro-wrestling storyline. So why not all three? A genre gang-bang, if you will.” He chuckles, and you feel his stump knock against your shoulder, as though he’s trying to sling his arm around your neck. “It’s funny; the other day I was lying the floor and I told him to get out so I could have my little pity party, and he just says, “My food’s in the microwave, cunt”— _god,_ I’d forgotten how much I missed him!”

Your eyes focus in on Tom’s happy, stupid face, until even that is a bowling ball blob and your palms are sweating so hard they come away ink-stained.

You’ve seen his shows; you’ve pulled Matt and Tom into this very theater and pulled up some shitty virus-ridden website on the big screen, watched through drunken, slinky-kneed phone cameras him sing and do voices and tell stories— him wearing an ever-growing tower of paper kids’ crowns, him fucking girls with less limbs than you, him making brain slushies of his latest political prisoners to the crashing waves of electro-pop, the whole crowd chanting/singing _SHOW ME YOUR BLOOD._

You’re the only one who ever paid much attention to it -- Tom had said his was better, that the experiments in style were tedious and stupid and lame, while Matt critiqued the costume design and asked why Tord didn’t install a vibrator or something into his robotic arm, he’s made better porn than this in a Nando’s bathroom.

So you smile, and tear the poster in two.

Red raises a brow.

“You’re such a shit liar.” Your smug, knowing smile only grows as you tear it into fourths, eighths, ball up the pieces and toss them over your shoulder.

“What are you on about?”

“Tom leaving. He’d never choose you over me, first of all— second of all, he thinks your “genre gangbangs” are dumb and pretentious, and _third_ of all—“

“He’s told you he’s gone blind, hasn’t he?”

From drinking methanol? “Yeah, and I told I’d pay for rehab, what of it?”

Red runs a hand over his scars, clasps them both in prayer and says slowly, like he’s explaining the concept of not chewing paste to a three-year-old, “You wanted him to work through rehab.”

“As a supervising director! From outpatient! He doesn’t even have to do any real shooting. We can’t push this movie back, and no one else has the clout he does— clout I gave him, by the way, by rescuing—"

 _“Stealing,_ you mean stealing some young indie directors’ work out from under them and slapping Tom’s name on it.”

“Stealing’s a very funny thing to call legally purchasing the rights to —“

“Because you knew they were young and debt-ridden and too immature to know how much you were underselling them.”

You slump back in your seat, crossing your arms over your chest. “Well if Tom didn’t like it, he could’ve told me.” You catch that silver eye rolling in your periphery, so you turn up the heat: “And I definitely don’t need any lectures on integrity from the guy who helped me renovate this place just so he could hide a fucking _secret laboratory_ in it and used the job I gave him to embezzle from me. Wanna talk about stealing? What about that, hmm? What about the cities you’ve bombed and the news anchors you’ve kidnapped for your stupid speeches and the fucking leg you _stole_ from me—“

“What about the eye you stole from me?”

“You weren’t using it! It was all ugly and scarred over — it didn’t even bleed when we removed it.”

“That doesn’t mean you can take it out on _pay-per-view.”_

“That doesn’t mean you can try and take my friends away from me!” You don’t know when you two started screaming, but your faces are too close, you can smell the old alcohol on his breath, too much like Tom and his Smirnoff, and words ripping themselves out of your throat with a mind of their own. “You’ve taken the last thirty years away, isn’t that enough?”

And suddenly you’re kissi—

He shoves you away. “Don’t **_fucking_ ** touch me.”

You lunge for him, swinging your fake leg in a wide arc, and you two are on the floor just as suddenly. Punching and kicking and snarling until he manages to toss your leg away and slam his boot into your stomach.

Again.

Again.

Again.

He stops and waits, watching as you rub your abdomen and cough with familiar, burning pain.

He doesn’t kick your leg any further away, the way that crazy union leader had with your wheelchair when he tried to force you to slash the labor tax— your first execution, free to stream and open to the public, one of the last times your private cell chimed with a _good job, he deserved it_ and _bloody idiot was making me look bad._

Instead Red gently kicks your leg back within your reach, struggling to control his breathing, carding his hand through his hair over and over as you try to swallow the bile that wants to explode out your throat.

“Regardless,” he says finally, still breathing heavily, “Tom’s defected to the Dark Side, where I’ve outfitted him the new set of LED eyes you banned because one of the inventors liked Pepsi.” He spits the word at you like an arrow, but with a smile. “So I have to thank you for giving me a new sniper through your own infinite stupidity.”

You sputter and slip on your tongue, but you can’t keep your own bitter, humorless laugh in, either. “I have to thank you, though, Red; every time your Army attacks, sales of all doomsday prep-related items go up!”

“And every time inflation and unemployment go up, our recruitment numbers soar.”

“See it's like poetry,” You try to sound serious, but you're quoting George Lucus circa prequels production, so how can you? “Every stanza kinda rhy—"

“Are you ever gonna grow up, Edd?”

He’s so shocked by the sound of his own name he doesn’t dare move. 

And he can see the scene outside his own body, like a shot from a reality TV show. Close up on Tord's face, shot reverse shot.

Or maybe a lingering wide, then shot to Tord's fists balling and un-balling, reverse shot to Edd, still barely breathing at all. Edd hardly dares breathe -- if anything in this tableau vivant changes, the magic will all be lost.

_Ah, the Crippling Fear of Change dollar, that's a big dollar._

“Where's the fun in that?" You ask finally.

He merely shakes his head and turns towards the door.

“Wait, wait! Tord, stay, come back.” The words fall off your tongue before you can stop them. You're crawling, hands and knees, groping desperately for his leg. "Stay with me. Just a little longer.”

He stops and lets you grab onto him, and in that action alone you find the truth about everything you’ve ever needed to know.

“What do you want to do?” He asks.

Your tongue goes dry as and your eyes dart wildly around, anything, anything... there's a mug of thick, overpriced pens on your desk. Not markers, not paint, not your best friend, but maybe you can both pretend that doesn't matter and let reality have its say in the morning. Take off your coat for a while and go and play. You lick your lips, staring up at him with wide, desperate eyes, words breathless. **_"Why don't we –”_ **


	3. I've been tryin' to make you love me

**_“—run away together?_** You and me, Edd,” Tord sounds so eager and innocent, like you two aren’t standing in the hands and mouth of a giant crimson robot, Tord, how did you even fit that in our fucking _house?_ “It’ll be perfect.”

“And we’ll be doing …what?” You ask. Don’t look down; you’ve never been too good with heights, and up here the wind picks up and you’re sure you can see birds level with your shoulder. By God, don’t look down.

“Taking over the world, of course!” Tord throws his arms wide, and you’re scared for a moment that he’s going to pull you into an embrace (one you probably would’ve melted right into, because you’re weak and always have been). “What we’ve both always wanted.”

“As a  _ joke.” _

And you’re waiting for him to break out that smug, crooked grin and tell them to bring out the cameras, instead he quips back, “I wasn’t joking. I told you so plenty of times.”

“Yeah,” your voice is getting higher, so you gulp and try to force it back down. “I remember, but that was supposed to be part of the joke.” The same way it’s funny when a short person who’s never lifted anything heavier than a teddy bear claims they’re gonna fist fight God – it’s the incongruity, heightened by the late nights struggling together on maths homework, and the arrogance of adolescence.

Has Tord always looked so – so –

The only material difference is his picklhaub, but somehow his face looks so _tired._ Ages beyond his twenty years, eyes dark and hard. A perfect replica that screams its own falsehood.

“Edd,” Tord’s voice is edged with steel. “I can’t protect you if you don’t come with me.” A parent giving you one last out before they take their belt off.

The bottom of your stomach drops out, and you can practically hear the hydraulics in your brain hissing, thoughts short and missing pieces. “Why would I need protecting? Tord, none of this makes any sense!”

“I can explain it all later; trust me, you’re gonna think it’s hilarious.” Tord grabs your wrists and starts to yank you forward, off the robot’s hand and onto its bulletproof-glass jaw, but your instincts dig your heels in.

“I don’t see how,” you snap back.

A dismissive rolls of his hand. “With time.”

Ah, yes, that old equation, of comedy = tragedy + time, the one in which time has always been ten minutes or less when it’s just you and Tord, or however long it took for you to scale his house with a bedsheet rope after his parents divorced, or for you to set aflame the piñata he bought you after you were cheated on for the first time.

No, it’s never taken much time at all.

But there are still variables missing – one buried in the rubble of your house, one still on the ground, screaming questions neither of you can really hear. “And why can’t you bring Tom and Matt, too?”

“Edd,” his grip on your wrists is about to break bones, " _ elskete _ , please, we have to leave  _ now.” _

“I – I can’t.” You writhe out of his grasp and step back, ankle nearly twisting on sudden pit in the middle of the robot’s hand.

Missiles. Those are for missiles. Like the ones that razed your house to the ground.

And you’re not naïve, you’re no stranger to bloodshed anymore, but this is all suddenly far, far too real and too far away to be real at all.

And the man standing before you is no longer your lover, come back after ten years in the shape of the gaping pinprick hole in your heart that can never seem to fill.

His whole body seems to droop, as though the puppeteer has cut a few strings. Mostly, he looks like he hasn’t truly slept in years.

“Can I at least kiss you?” he asks after a moment, voice so low and quiet you almost miss it. A small smile, clearly forced, though it makes your heart skip anyway. “Just this last time?”

Maybe in a week, in a day, you’ll look back on this moment and laugh, because he’s acting the part in some cheesy harlequin romance as if you two aren’t standing atop a mecha straight from his middle school bookshelf. And that’s a little funny, maybe, probably (Matt and Tom probably won’t agree).

So you force on a smile too, and he holds out his arms for you to walk into. The plasticity melts away from his face, then from yours, and a warmth rushes through your chest. So you step up to him and let him cradle your face in his hand, throw an arm around your neck and pull you in, kissing you so hard your lips are going to spilt. But you giggle and kiss him back harder, and he does, too, a pleasant, goofy sound.

You don’t even have the time to wipe the dumb grin from your face before **_he shoots you through the–_ **


	4. but everything I try just takes you further from me

**_– neck,_ ** up his face and eyepatch and thinner hair, down to the place where scarred flesh becomes red metal.

This isn’t your Tord.

For the first time in months, that thought wouldn’t make Tom rolls his eyes and snap you’re being too sentimental. Tord is Tord, and he fucked us over. There was no “real” him that cared about us deep down. Move on.

This time, you mean that your Tord – whether that’s the weeb you’d known since childhood or the megalomaniac who tried wearing that weeb’s skin – is not the man looking at you through the crack in your door. Because your Tord is dead.

This assertion is only bolstered by the fact that Matt is still shrieking in your ear about the horrible monster who knocked on his door, “Scared me half to death, Edd! Do you think ugly’s contagious? Oh, I need to disinfect my whole apartment now.”  The Not Tord rolls his eyes as Matt giggles over the line. “Well, on second thought, if it was that contagious I would've gotten it from you and Tom ages ago.”

You end the call.

He chuckles, even as you redouble your efforts to shut the door on his fingers. “Glad to see you’re as petty as ever,” he says.

A brief hum of agreement. You throw your shoulder against the door and try to pry his fingers off individually, but that doesn’t work, either. “Now get out.”

“Edd,  _ please,” _ but his voice is the same. Pleading and desperate and hoarse, but still the same. The same Tord, whispering in your ear, muttering in his sleep, laughing with you and Matt and Tom.

Betraying all of you, getting shot out of the sky.

Well, this wouldn’t be the first time he’s come back from the dead, now would it?

He slips his shoulder in through the door. “I just wanna talk.”

You toss your weight on the door again, which only forces him back an inch, heels digging into the pavement. He seems like he’s retreating for a moment, but then he shoves the door so far you hear the screws on the chain give a little, jolting you so harshly you stumble back.

The only thing keeping him out is what remains of his common courtesy, and the chain on your door. 

“Oh, sorry about that,” goes the voice on the other side. “Still getting used to this thing. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“If you wanna talk to anyone,” you snap, giving the door a kick. “Go talk to Tom – I’m sure he’d  _ love _ to hear how your survived that.”

You can’t see him, but you hope that made him wince. That would, however, require he give a shit in the first place.

“You really think Tom’s interested in anything I have to say?” Tord asks, like that’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard.

“What makes you think I’m interested in what you have to say?” You slam your other shoulder into the door. “Get. Out.”

But the hand doesn’t budge; the chain is pulled taut, nervously vibrating like it’s about to snap at any moment.

“Alright, I’ll admit it: I’m selfish. I don’t care what Tom or Matt or anyone else has to say. Not right now.” His good silver eye appears in the crack in the door. “But I care about you.”

“Oh really?” He’s already lying; if he didn’t care what Matt had to say, why bother knocking on his door, first? Unless he got the numbers mixed – and you change your mind to the option less charitable. “You expect me to believe that?”

“No, not really.”

The bluntness of it makes you pause momentarily.

“But I know you,” Tord continues, “and I know that you know that if you don’t let me in and hear me out, you’re gonna be up the rest of the month regretting it.” He flashes you a knowing smile, to which you respond with a bird. The smile falls. “Come on, Edd, you heard how Matt reacted to –  _ this.” _ He gestures a hand up his scarred half. “And we both know Tom will flip his shit if I so much as breathe in his direction. They can wait.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I can’t wait for you to leave.” You shove yourself off the door and stalk off into your kitchen, ignoring his questions, searching through your closet – you surely have your sword here somewhere, or at the very least your shovel. Or one of the harpoons Tom gave you after the whole debacle, _'in case that creep ever comes back.'_

Well, he’s back.

“Edd, I’m here because you’re the glue of the group, you always have been. And you’re the sanest one out of all of – hey, where did you get that sword?” He asks, wholly unintimated but not unimpressed. “Looks cool.”

He sounds too much like he did in middle school, back when he was obsessed with owning a katana.

You press the tip into his nose a little more, almost hard enough to draw blood, but he simply raises his gloved human hand and pulls the sword away. His grin widens, voice suddenly cheerful and teasing. “Come on, Edd! For old times’ sake.” Between your feet, Ringo has finally decided to sate her curiosity. She slips as much of her head as she can out the crack in the door, sniffing Tord’s worn boots. “See, even Ringo misses me.”

You jab the tip of the sword against his chest, just enough to rip the cloth over his heart. “Go to hell.”

He grabs the blade with his metal hand, jamming the door with the steel toe of his boot.  _ “We can’t.” _ You drop the sword ( _ fucking idiot _ ) and throw your body against the entrance again and again, ignoring the fuzzy memories churning deep in the sea of your mind, forcing him to maneuver the whole of his arm through the space, elbow digging a rut into the doorframe. 

On the television, Zero Mostel is singing about how there must be a moral. 

You hear a familiar Norwegian curse under his breath, but the black space where his eye used to be stares. “Not alone.”

You stare at him for a few long moments, studying the scars that rope the left side of his face, disappearing under the eyepatch.

“You really wanna be comparing me letting you in to Krissy being almost dragged to Hell right now?”

He looks so different, but the boy you knew is in there. In that shaky, crooked smile.

He gives a hapless shrug. “It’s roughly on par with going back to actual Hell.”

That is true. Hell, like love and many other things, is way better in the movies.

“No funny business?” You ask. He nods, but you suddenly shake your head. “On second thought, Cenobites are pretty shit at promises. So just don’t promise anything.”

“Got it, chief,” he says, and you’re back in the past, in him knocking on your door to go on a pizza run, or to go out and stargaze, passing the same cigar back and forth between you, you making fun of his trench coat and he your band shirts, made all the funnier when it’s ones he’s bought for you.

The whole ensemble now: _morals tomorrow, comedy tonight!_

That’s life: You either roll with the joke, or die a miserable punchline.

So despite yourself, you return his smile as you reach up, and take the chain off the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I would have more to say about this, since I'd originally planned it to be my last fanfiction and this big, grand send-off -- six interlocking short stories about my favorite eddsworld pairing, because us EddTords deserve our own overly long and pretentious second person pov fics, damn it! -- but part two is just. Not. It's just not happening. God knows I have tried, but the emotional baggage surrounding it is too much for me to feel justified spending any more time on it. Even just writing this endnote is deeply saddening. So I'm glad that "horseshoe's daughter" is technically my last fic, as everything in this one has been done for months if not a whole year. Neither of these endings are exactly triumphant, especially in any conventional way, but it's probably the closest to closure I'm gonna get. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed reading! Feel free to message me on [tumblr](https://the-resurrection-3d.tumblr.com/) or comment if you want! I'll see you all later.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [werewolf heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19815343) by [The_Resurrection_3D](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Resurrection_3D/pseuds/The_Resurrection_3D)




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